Shopped

See the show, get the T-shirt: one from the V&A's Diane Arbus exhibition shop

I find Diane Arbus easier to admire than like, and looking at the survey of her work at the Victoria and Albert Museum I thought she must have a large splinter of ice in her heart to have photographed who she did the way she did.

When she shot groups of what she called "retarded women" in New Jersey she went into rapture about her "gorgeous" pictures, the light in them "so lyric and tender and pretty". But it's hard to detect any real sympathy with the subjects, either in the way she pictured them or wrote about them, just a cool voyeuristic gaze.

Anyway, having finished looking at the exhibition, you get spat out right into the brightly lit exhibition shop. Now that is something I do resent a bit.

I know that it's important for free-entry museums such as the V&A to derive income from their shops and cafes. But as a museum visitor I'd like some choice over whether I walk away from the art in calm and silence or get thrown barbarously into a blatant consumer zone.

The layout of rooms even seemed in this case to be suggesting the shop as the blistering climax of the show, as you emerged into the dramatic light with the various Arbusalia laid out ready for your delectation and music more suited to the interior of a lift twiddling away in the background. Suddenly I was reminded of the dreaded former V&A tagline: "an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached" - this was an ace shop with quite a nice show attached, although I am not sure why I should want an Empire State Building paperweight to remind me of this dead, suicidal photographer, or a wirework model of the Chrysler building, or even a T-shirt inscribed with one of her aphorisms.

I love shopping, and I'm not averse to a bit of post-exhibition browsing. But please, please don't rub our noses in it like this.